The Continental Op
Encyclopedia
Fictional character
A character is the representation of a person in a narrative work of art . Derived from the ancient Greek word kharaktêr , the earliest use in English, in this sense, dates from the Restoration, although it became widely used after its appearance in Tom Jones in 1749. From this, the sense of...
created by Dashiell Hammett
Dashiell Hammett
Samuel Dashiell Hammett was an American author of hard-boiled detective novels and short stories, and political activist. Among the enduring characters he created are Sam Spade , Nick and Nora Charles , and the Continental Op .In addition to the significant influence his novels and stories had on...
. A private investigator
Private investigator
A private investigator , private detective or inquiry agent, is a person who can be hired by individuals or groups to undertake investigatory law services. Private detectives/investigators often work for attorneys in civil cases. Many work for insurance companies to investigate suspicious claims...
employed as an operative of the Continental Detective Agency's San Francisco office, he never gives his name and so is known only by his job description.
Profile
The Continental Op is a master of deceit in the exercise of his profession. In "$106,000 Blood Money", for instance, the Op is confronted with two dilemmas: shall he expose a corrupt fellow detective, thereby hurting the reputation of his agency; and shall he also allow an informantInformant
An informant is a person who provides privileged information about a person or organization to an agency. The term is usually used within the law enforcement world, where they are officially known as confidential or criminal informants , and can often refer pejoratively to the supply of information...
to collect the $106,000 reward in a big case even though he is morally certain — but cannot prove — that the informant has murder
Murder
Murder is the unlawful killing, with malice aforethought, of another human being, and generally this state of mind distinguishes murder from other forms of unlawful homicide...
ed one of his agency's clients? The Op resolves his two problems neatly by manipulating events so that the corrupt detective and the informant get into an armed confrontation in which both are killed.
Decades of witnessing human cruelty, misery, and ruin, as well as being instrumental in sending hundreds of people to jail, or to the gallows, have greatly weakened the Op's natural sympathy with his fellow men. He fears becoming like his boss, "The Old Man", whom he describes as "a shell, without any human feelings whatsoever".
In the penultimate chapter of The Dain Curse
The Dain Curse
The Dain Curse is a novel written by Dashiell Hammett and published in 1929.- Plot summary :The detective known only as The Continental Op investigates a diamond heist that looks like an inside job. He is told of a supposed curse on the Dain family, said to inflict sudden and violent deaths upon...
, a female client, whose life the Op has saved three times, while also curing her of morphine
Morphine
Morphine is a potent opiate analgesic medication and is considered to be the prototypical opioid. It was first isolated in 1804 by Friedrich Sertürner, first distributed by same in 1817, and first commercially sold by Merck in 1827, which at the time was a single small chemists' shop. It was more...
addiction, says to him:
The Op can be regarded as a protoype for the hardboiled
Hardboiled
Hardboiled crime fiction is a literary style, most commonly associated with detective stories, distinguished by the unsentimental portrayal of violence and sex. The style was pioneered by Carroll John Daly in the mid-1920s, popularized by Dashiell Hammett over the course of the decade, and refined...
detective exemplified in such characters as Hammett's Sam Spade
Sam Spade
Sam Spade is a fictional character who is the protagonist of Dashiell Hammett's 1930 novel The Maltese Falcon and the various films and adaptations based on it, as well as in three lesser known short stories by Hammett....
, Raymond Chandler
Raymond Chandler
Raymond Thornton Chandler was an American novelist and screenwriter.In 1932, at age forty-five, Raymond Chandler decided to become a detective fiction writer after losing his job as an oil company executive during the Depression. His first short story, "Blackmailers Don't Shoot", was published in...
's Philip Marlowe
Philip Marlowe
Philip Marlowe is a fictional character created by Raymond Chandler in a series of novels including The Big Sleep and The Long Goodbye. Marlowe first appeared under that name in The Big Sleep published in 1939...
, Ross Macdonald
Ross Macdonald
Not to be confused with John D. MacDonaldRoss Macdonald is the pseudonym of the American-Canadian writer of crime fiction Kenneth Millar...
's Lew Archer
Lew Archer
Lew Archer is a fictional character created by Ross Macdonald. Archer is a private detective working in Southern California.-Profile:Initially, Lew Archer was similar to Philip Marlowe. However, he eventually broke from that mold, though some similarities remain...
, and others.
Works
The Continental Op made his debut in an October 1923 issue of Black Mask, making him one of the earliest hard-boiled private detective characters to appear in the pulp magazinePulp magazine
Pulp magazines , also collectively known as pulp fiction, refers to inexpensive fiction magazines published from 1896 through the 1950s. The typical pulp magazine was seven inches wide by ten inches high, half an inch thick, and 128 pages long...
s of the early twentieth century. He appeared in 36 short stories, all but two of which appeared in Black Mask.
In 1927, Hammett began writing linked stories, which formed the basis for his first two novels, Red Harvest
Red Harvest
Red Harvest is a novel by Dashiell Hammett. The story is narrated by The Continental Op, a frequent character in Hammett's fiction. Hammett based the story on his own experiences in Butte, Montana as an operative of the Continental Detective Agency, San Francisco.Time included Red Harvest in its...
and The Dain Curse, both released in 1929. Two other stories, "The Big Knockover" and "$106,000 Blood Money" were published as Blood Money in 1943. Hammett also wrote a two-story sequence in the summer of 1924 consisting of "The House in Turk Street" and "The Girl with the Silver Eyes." These were recently published (along with The Dain Curse, The Glass Key
The Glass Key
The Glass Key is a novel by Dashiell Hammett, said to be his favorite among his works. It was first published in 1931, and tells the story of gambler and racketeer Ned Beaumont, whose devotion to crooked political boss Paul Madvig leads him to investigate the murder of a local senator's son as a...
, and Blood Money) in a Modern Library edition, though they are not dubbed officially as a novel as was Blood Money.
Of the 28 stories not a part of Red Harvest
Red Harvest
Red Harvest is a novel by Dashiell Hammett. The story is narrated by The Continental Op, a frequent character in Hammett's fiction. Hammett based the story on his own experiences in Butte, Montana as an operative of the Continental Detective Agency, San Francisco.Time included Red Harvest in its...
or The Dain Curse, 26 are available in one of three collections from Vintage Crime, The Big Knockover (1966), The Continental Op (1974), and Nightmare Town (1999), and/or the Library of America collection Crime Stories and Other Writings (2001).
A number of collections of Hammett stories, both books collecting Continental Op stories (The Continental Op, The Return of the Continental Op) and others with miscellaneous Hammett stories, were published as Dell mapback
Mapback
Mapback is a term used by paperback collectors to refer to the earliest paperback books published by Dell Books, beginning in 1943. The books are known as mapbacks because the back cover of the book contains a map that illustrates the location of the action. Dell books were numbered in series...
s. These collections all contained introductory essays by Ellery Queen
Ellery Queen
Ellery Queen is both a fictional character and a pseudonym used by two American cousins from Brooklyn, New York: Daniel Nathan, alias Frederic Dannay and Manford Lepofsky, alias Manfred Bennington Lee , to write, edit, and anthologize detective fiction.The fictional Ellery Queen created by...
. A more recent edition contains an astute short introduction by Columbia professor Steven Marcus.
In 1978, The Dain Curse was made into a six-hour CBS
CBS
CBS Broadcasting Inc. is a major US commercial broadcasting television network, which started as a radio network. The name is derived from the initials of the network's former name, Columbia Broadcasting System. The network is sometimes referred to as the "Eye Network" in reference to the shape of...
television miniseries starring James Coburn
James Coburn
James Harrison Coburn III was an American film and television actor. Coburn appeared in nearly 70 films and made over 100 television appearances during his 45-year career, and played a wide range of roles and won an Academy Award for his supporting role as Glen Whitehouse in Affliction.A capable,...
. For the miniseries, the Op was named Hamilton Nash (his creator's name spelled "sideways.")
Complete list of stories
- "Arson Plus" (Black Mask, Oct. 1, 1923) (as Peter Collinson) (CS)
- "Slippery Fingers" (Black Mask, 15 Oct. 1923) (as Peter Collinson) (CS)
- "Crooked Souls" (“The Gatewood Caper”) (Black Mask, Oct. 15, 1923) (BK) (CS)
- "It” (“The Black Hat That Wasn't There”) (Black Mask, Nov. 1, 1923)
- "Bodies Piled Up" (“House Dick”) (Black Mask, December 1, 1923) (NT)
- "The Tenth Clew" (Black Mask, January 1, 1924) (CO) (CS) (RO)
- "Night Shots" (Black Mask, February 1924) (NT)
- "Zigzags of Treachery" (Black Mask, March 1, 1924) (NT) (CS)
- "One Hour" (Black Mask, April 1924) (NT) (RO)
- "The House in Turk Street" (Black Mask, April 15, 1924) (CO) (CS)
- "The Girl with Silver Eyes" (Black Mask, June 1924) (CO) (CS)
- "Women, Politics and Murder” (“Death on Pine Street”) (Black Mask, September 1924) (NT) (CS)
- "The Golden Horseshoe" (Black Mask, November 1924) (CO) (CS)
- "Who Killed Bob Teal?" (True Detective Stories, November 1924) (NT)
- "Mike, Alec or Rufus?” (“Tom, Dick or Harry”) (Black Mask, January 1925) (NT)
- "The Whosis Kid" (Black Mask, March 1925) (CO) (CS) (RO)
- "The Scorched Face" (Black Mask, May 1925) (BK) (CS)
- "Corkscrew" (Black Mask, September 1925) (BK)
- "Dead Yellow Women" (Black Mask, November 1925) (BK) (CS)
- The Gutting of CouffignalThe Gutting of CouffignalThe Gutting of Couffignal is a hardboiled crime short story by Dashiell Hammett, who is considered one of the greatest writers of this genre and the first of this school to have his work considered for literary qualities never until then associated with "genre writing." It appears, along with nine...
(Black Mask, December 1925) (BK) (CS) (RO) - "The Creeping Siamese" (Black Mask, March 1926) (CS)
- "The Big Knockover" (Black Mask, February 1927) (BK) (CS)
- "$106,000 Blood Money" (Black Mask, May 1927) (BK) (CS)
- "The Main Death" (Black Mask, June 1927) (CO) (CS)
- Stories republished as Red Harvest
- "The Cleansing of Poisonville" (Black Mask, November 1927)
- "Crime Wanted - Male or Female" (Black Mask, December 1927)
- "Dynamite" (Black Mask, January 1928)
- "The 19th Murder" (Black Mask, February 1928)
- "This King Business" (Mystery Stories, January 1928) (BK) (CS)
- Stories republished as The Dain Curse
- "Black Lives" (Black Mask, November 1928)
- "The Hollow Temple" (Black Mask, December 1928)
- "Black Honeymoon" (Black Mask, January 1929)
- "Black Riddle" (Black Mask, February 1929)
- "Fly Paper" (Black Mask, August 1929) (BK) (CS)
- "The Farewell Murder" (Black Mask, February 1930) (CO) (CS)
- "Death and Company" (Black Mask, November 1930) (RO)
BK = These stories appear in The Big Knockover
CO = These stories appear in The Continental Op
RO = These stories appear in The Return Of the Continental Op
NT = These stories appear in Nightmare Town
CS = These stories appear in Crime Stories and Other Writings
See also
- Detective fictionDetective fictionDetective fiction is a sub-genre of crime fiction and mystery fiction in which an investigator , either professional or amateur, investigates a crime, often murder.-In ancient literature:...
- List of Fallen Angels episodes ("Fly Paper" episode)